Monday, January 14, 2013

Faces!

You Serious?
 
This was a fun project, my friend which you see above showed me a portrait for a bearded man with lots of face details and wrinkles, and wanted to imitate the picture, so we gathered along with my brother and played a little with lights, hit the jump for more details.
 
I knew we would not be able create the exact same look becuase we didn't have enough time nor enough light modifiers to pull it off, but we did our best.
 
Rocky Balboa
 
For equipment we had three speedlites (580EX, 600EX-RT & YN-560 II, first two flashes were mine one day), three YN RF-603 wireless triggers, however we ended up using just 2 lights.
 
The camera was a Canon 60D and we used the 200mm f/2.8L (used to be mine as well), it was too long for indoor use (320mm equivalent), but we wanted to use it, especially that we had a very small black cardboard for the background.
 
Lighting was quite simple, we started by killing the ambient in manual mode, exposure was 1/250, f/11, ISO 200. Key light was a bare flash with the full Rogue Grid, high and 20 degrees camera left, you can easily figure out its position if you connect the shadow of the nose tip to the nose tip itself in the opening picture, flash power was 1/64, then for fill, I used a shoot through umbrella, camera right and almost on axis, then we tried several power settings until we were satisfied with what we got, I believe it was 1/32 power, but it was much less effective than the key because of the umbrella and the distance.
 
Serial Killer
 
Post processing was fairly simple, we intended to shoot in B&W from the beginning, so I took the RAW files into LR, hit the B&W button in the colors panel, opened up the skin tones a bit (targeted dropper for saturation, then moved the mouse wheel upwards), added contrast and blacks, increased the clarity quite a bit, and finally used the adjustment brush to decrease the highlights and exposure at the surroundings of the face.
 
That's all, not bad for a couple of hours of fun, what do you think?
 
Astonished

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